Toxic
board relationships and asbestos scares: it was a fun-packed agenda at 100 Arthur Street, North Sydney on Thursday. Chairing the grim marathon board meeting at NBN Co headquarters was 41-year-old ­Siobhan ­McKenna, the former McKinsey consultant who is by her own admission “demanding ... sometimes unreasonably so”.

Also at the table was chief executive Mike Quigley, the great survivor who has held onto the job he was appointed to in 2009 despite embarrassing delays to the $37.4 billion project and stinging media criticism of its management.

Matters had come to a head, it is said, at a tense weekly three-way pow-wow between McKenna, Quigley and Stephen Conroy last Wednesday – at which the Communications Minister is thought to have put the kibosh on any idea of sacking the man he hired as NBN Co’s first employee.

A cosmetic organ?

That account would reinforce cynics’ long-held belief that the board of the government-business enterprise, indeed any government-business enterprise, is a fundamentally cosmetic organ.

But McKenna’s involvement since she succeeded Commonwealth Bank director Harrison Young has been anything but cosmetic. In fact, it’s starting to look like a job interview with Tony Abbott to keep or expand her role at the head of Australia’s biggest infrastructure project – assuming the Liberals do as everyone expects and romp to election victory in September.

The mother-of-three has been all over it: from meeting contractors in Western Australia, to direct briefings from Quigley’s own direct reports at HQ about the state of the business, to gate-crashing his cosy weekly catch up with Conroy like an overbearing gooseberry.

It’s the behaviour one might expect of an executive chairman, which is the role ­McKenna is believed to have been gunning for if Quigley had been removed. After Young’s benign non-executive approach, Quigley, who has reigned over NBN Co from day one, must feel he’s being performance-managed to hell. Ask anyone who works, or used to work, for Ten Network and they will tell you McKenna is not the hands-off sort.

They have described McKenna, who is managing partner of Lachlan Murdoch’s investment vehicle Illyria, as smart and disciplined but intellectually arrogant.

A name that draws strong responses

Her name draws strong responses, particularly from those hard-worn TV executives who clashed with her management consultancy style.

She became intimately involved during the television company’s recent troubles under the leadership of Murdoch and then James Warburton who was sacked in February and replaced by Hamish McLennan.

Murdoch needed someone to go through Ten, clean up the mess and slash costs and McKenna did it, installing herself in a office at Ten HQ and handling multiple ­redundancies.

Her closeness to Lachlan is a source of resentment among some of her rivals but some say it could be her saving grace as regards the NBN role under a Liberal government: the Murdoch scion is close to Abbott who, it is already being speculated, could potentially pull rank on Turnbull, and keep her in the chair.

If McKenna wanted more ammunition to go after her CEO, NBN Co’s June 30 target to have passed between 190,000 and 220,000 homes with high-speed fibre-optic cable could provide it.

Missed targets seem likely

Another delay to the roll-out would begin to look like carelessness. In recent weeks insiders have been questioning whether that target can be hit.

Now, media scares about asbestos have added to the likelihood that it will be ­missed.

Telstra has said it will retrain staff and sub-contractors about how to deal with the ­substance as it does emergency audits on pits it is contracted to clean up before handing them to NBN Co for fibre to be laid.

Ironically the asbestos scare could provide Quigley a badly-needed fig-leaf for any further delays.

The former chief operating officer of Alcatel-Lucent has been hanging on grimly to the job even as Labor heads for almost certain election defeat, taking his job with it.

In spite of his high regard in the telecommunications equipment industry, he has copped almost constant flak since taking the NBN job, including for his mishandling of questions over a corruption at his former employer.

Shadow Communications Minister ­Malcolm Turnbull has not held back, labelling Quigley “the wrong choice” for the job and speaking of “considerable changes in the management level” if the Liberals are elected and perform radical surgery on the project as promised.

But the cancer survivor, who doesn’t take bonuses and donated his first year’s salary to charity, seems determined to see the job through – at least to the election – ­presumably to validate his leadership of the project he started and leave some kind of legacy.

Considerable changes possible

It will not have escaped McKenna’s attention that Turnbull has also spoken of “very considerable changes” at the board level.

Turnbull has approached the likes of former Telstra chief executive Ziggy Switkowski about playing a role in a board with beefed-up telco and contracting experience.

The board currently consists of McKenna, Quigley and two other long-standing directors: former Westpac executive Diane Smith-Gander, now a director of Wesfarmers, Transfield Services and CBH Group; and veteran banker turned non-executive director Terry Francis.

Appointed last year were former M&A partner at Mallesons Stephen Jaques, Alison Lansley; former UBS Australia CEO and chairman Brad Orgill, and public servant Kerry Schott, who was recently appointed by NSW Treasury to be the project director of the proposed sale of the government owned electricity generating plants.

Retired Leighton Contractors executive Rick Turchini was appointed as a director in September 2011.

McKenna herself is said to have been a vocal critic of NBN’s myriad problems at board meetings for some time.

But having been a board member herself since August 2009 she is hardly without ­culpability for its shortcomings.